


A Study In Sherlock

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, slashy if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They really aren't at all alike." Character study: In the face of common sense not doing what it says on the tin, Sherlock and John each try to make sense of the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study In Sherlock

**Author's Note:**

> Beta-ed by Eric.

They really aren’t at all alike. Everyone says it, whether they do so out loud or not – they even say it themselves, out of some kind of wry inevitability. ‘The odd couple.’ (Lestrade.) ‘The freak and his keeper.’ (Donovan, with an eyeroll and a toss of her head.) ‘The dilettante and the thrill-seeker.’ (Mycroft.) Even the Alleged Anthea’s said it, although naturally she did so in a text to her boss, dashed off in the back of a cab to Waterloo. Everyone says it, everyone will continue to say it, until even they themselves have accepted it as true.

Sherlock Holmes (thirty-five years old, six foot two in his socks, twelve stone three) is an irritable, irritating explosion of a man, a supernova in expensive black. He’s a calculating machine (John has seen him do the _Times_ crossword in under forty seconds), a daredevil (with the emphasis on ‘devil’), a virtuoso (John has seen him cry at Vivaldi). Sherlock goes weeks without communicating beyond a book-throwing, moody monosyllable (John has long been convinced the man cannot possibly be what the medical establishment calls neurotypical, though he’d argue the label of ‘sociopath’, high-functioning or otherwise), then assaults the world with words, explanations, commands, derision.

The laughter, John notices, is reserved for one person alone.

Sherlock Holmes is comfortable in loneliness, striding long-legged and far-sighted through a sea of ignored humanity with his coat wrapped around him so tight he seems bullet-proof, but sulks if John leaves their flat for a night. Sherlock never enters a room when he could be leaving one; Sherlock scorns propriety, ignores niceties, forgets birthdays, doesn’t say hello.

Sherlock’s sleeves are rolled up and slipping down his forearms, bruise-silk purple, blue and black against coltish white limbs. He’s angular and awkward as a gymnast in a cage, hyperactive as a bird. Black curls roll like sea waves over a moonish face as his head cants, hawklike; childishly full lips pout, ponder, twist, are bitten in thought, spill thoughtless criticisms and snapped commands. Wide pale eyes miss nothing anyone wants him to, squint in street lights, ignore the moon. Sherlock sleeps (when he remembers) sprawled out across the bed like a careless child, taking up the maximum possible space: one arm spread wide, long fingers outstretched to grasp the secrets that escape him still as he sleeps – fidgety, but deep as Frankenstein’s corpse. He abhors company (though he clings to London, most crowded of cities, like a child to a dirty but beloved stuffed bear) and hates to be touched, springing upright with a shock and the ruffled look of an irate owl.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist. He himself has told John that heroes don’t, after all, and he should know: he always does. He has archenemies like a comicbook superman, fights like an antihero, lives like one invincible. No-one can do what Sherlock does: no-one has alabaster skin the way he has alabaster skin. No-one else looks, when riding the hit of three nicotine patches at once or detecting a serial killer from one left shoe, as if they were carved out of fragments of marble by a mad sculptor. He could have walked straight out of the pages of a book, and half the reason John has never told his therapist about him is that he’s borderline convinced that he _has_. Blog or no blog, John keeps most of his observations of Sherlock Holmes to himself.

Sherlock Holmes is hell to live with, in a flat strewn with landmines metaphorical and (no doubt, hidden somewhere in the flotsam of London and jetsam of a hundred thousand solved crimes) literal: heads in the fridge, eyeballs in the microwave, old takeout boxes stacked up to the ceiling in aloof heedlessness of Mrs Hudson’s complaints. He is the violin wailing at 4am, the hacked laptop in the afternoon, the calls at midday to come home and make him tea (milk, two sugars). He is skipped breakfasts, fled lunches, dinner eaten so late that they’ve forgotten how to be hungry; he is a disaster waiting to happen, and John doesn’t know what he’ll do when it does. Sherlock Holmes is a lazy, egotistical, infuriating, brilliant wonky-faced _bastard_ , and the worst thing about him is that John knows he’ll be fascinated by him for the rest of his life.

~*~

John Henry Watson (thirty-six years old, five foot seven and a half in his army boots, eleven stone six when discharged from the army like a broken rifle) is solid and stolidly matter-of-fact, a banked fire next to the imploding star that is Sherlock Holmes. He’s always been called a sensible man (so why he resides where he does is anyone’s guess, his own included), kindly and with a brand of charm all his own, charm all the more potent in the face of his flatmate’s utter lack of it (and yet Sherlock is not an unattractive man, despite all his best efforts to smother his own gauche appeal). Tiny half-defined lines at the corner of his eyes indicate a quirky, lively sense of humour (little-used, of late), and indeed the lines of his mouth seem ill-suited for loneliness, happy surrounded by a matey barrack-room camaraderie that (Sherlock suspects) is reminiscent for him of the soldier-boys before they all swooped for their desert war – and yet he remains uneasy, holds himself awkwardly, finds the need to limp.

John Watson, so-called sensible man, is an adrenaline addict to the bone. He’s calm – if unimaginative – under pressure, with flashes of something that Sherlock thinks could almost be brilliance like a muted rumble of thunder, albeit muffled compared to his own. It’s this that fascinates him about the man, or so he tells himself and the skull sitting in judgment upon the mantelpiece. John, after all, _cares_. He cares like a flash flood, overwhelming and almost terrifying to someone who can barely keep afloat amidst the normal ebb and flow of human emotion. The doctor sleeps with his illegal service revolver under his pillow, these days, like a child with a reassuring stuffed toy. He stands taller and straighter when they attend a crime scene, shoulders perfectly squared like a playing card (with something of a playing card’s fragility. What would it take, Sherlock wonders, to would make his house of cards tumble down?). John was – is – an exemplary soldier boy, but a poor civilian, as uneasy around civilians as Sherlock but better at hiding it, and he clings to London and its thousand tiny warzones with a survivor’s guilt and heady joy. London, to him, is a drug as much as the nicotine patches are to Sherlock, making his eyes brighten and his pulse quicken, reminding him he’s alive.

(Sherlock wonders how many people have, over the years, labelled John Watson an ordinary man. It’s a thought that, for him, confirms all he’s ever suspected about the puerile idiocy of the human race, for John Watson is not normal, could never be normal. John Watson is not much of a mystery, even to himself, but he’s fascinating all the same.)

John sleeps – when he sleeps, between his latest locum jobs and the girlfriend (who Sherlock actually can’t quite bring himself to dislike, much to his own distaste) and being dragged off after a mass-murderer who apparently had no other space in his schedule but 5am for a murder – stretched out and exhausted, grateful to be too tired to dream. Sometimes, though, when the world has been running him less ragged than usual, John sleeps as if curling in on himself, twitching and flailing as he fights old wars, fights to stop the blood flowing or to drive the Taleban out of Jalalabad. On those nights, and only those nights, he talks to himself in words that spill incomprehensibly from his lips, volume rising and falling in inexorable cadences.

At least once, Sherlock’s heard him scream. It is one of the very few observations of John Watson that he has kept to himself, partly because he realises John won’t want to explain and partly because he doesn’t care to think how much he wants him to.

It has been said, many times in many ways and by a lot of people whose business it for the most part isn’t, that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are not at all alike. Everyone who knows them knows it, after all: it’s common knowledge, only a short while since they’ve met. The problem with this school of common thought is that few examples of it are ever actually right. Sherlock and John are very much not alike, but when they come down to the bare bones of themselves they’re more similar than either of them can allow themselves to realise.


End file.
